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The Book of Negroes

When Aminata Diallo sits down to pen the story of her life in London, England, at the dawn of the 19th century, she has a wealth of experience behind her. Abducted at the age of eleven from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea. Aminata is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. Years later, she forges her way to freedom and registers her name in the "Book of Negroes," a historic ledger allowing 3,000 Black Loyalists passage on ships sailing from Manhattan to Nova Scotia.

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The book of Negros is a hit. In fact, I couldn't put it down from the start. This really annoyed my wife. I also watched the show from CBC which was so boring and mostly missing the key events that was mentioned in the book. I really recommend this book for everyone to read regardless of their race. the Main character , Amina Dilayo stunned me , she was an intelligent young women despite all of the turmoil she went through, she never lost faith in God.

The book was really good but I found I just couldn't connect with the main character, she didn't feel real to me. It felt as though the author wanted her to be part of all these main events of history and rushed her story through it, as one of the previous reviews said - it was as though she was floating through these things and they were't really happening to her. I wasn't aware of Birchtown or Freetown previous to this and I really found those parts fascinating.

I read Lawrence Hill's "The Book of Negroes" for the 2016 Ottawa Public Library Reading Challenge, under the category of a Canada Reads selection. The book was the winner of Canada Reads in 2009. I also watched the CBC's production of The Book of Negroes a couple of years ago. I highly recommend both the book and the TV series. Hill's writing style and method of storytelling are phenomenal.

I didn't really like this book. Aminata didn't seem like a real person and her character had a really masculine feel. Her character felt like a man trying to write as a woman. It touches on some really interesting aspects of Canadian history though, and is still worth a read.

Based on the real life 'Book of Negroes' this is the imagined story of a young African muslim villager, kidnapped and shipped to the indigo plantations of South Carolina as a slave, who is evacuated to Nova Scotia after the American War of Independence and later shifts to Sierra Leone. It's a fictional telling of the extraordinary story told in Simon Schama's 'Rough Crossings'.

Quotes

Aminata Diallo: "Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary" (Hill 7).

Aminata Diallo: " I have wondrously beautiful hands. I like to put them on things. I like to feel the bark on trees, the hair on children's heads, and before my time is up, I would like to place those hands on a good man's body, if the occasion arises" (Hill 6).

"I have escaped violent endings even as they have surrounded me. But I never had the privilege of holding onto my children living with him, raising them the way my own parents raised me for ten or eleven years until all of our lives were torn asunder." - Aminata Diallo

Notices

Summary

Lawrence Hill's fictional biography, The Book of Negroes, grabs the reader from the first sentence. Aminata Diallo lives in the village of Bayo in West Africa and, because her mother and father come from different groups, speaks both their languages. In 1745, at eleven years old, Aminata is stolen from her village by slavers and marched three months westward to the Atlantic Ocean. Once there, she is placed on a slave ship and transported to South Carolina where she is sold to an indigo producer.

The girl endures hellish conditions both in the slave ship and on the indigo plantation, but is finally sold to a family her takes her to the infant city of New York. Aminata never loses her determination to escape captivity and to return to her village, but her life leads her into paths that she cannot predict.

Hill not only tells a fascinating story, he also presents a very readable history of the conditions and economic levers driving slavery. The book takesthe reader across continents, oceans, and countries, as well as through the factors that forced Britain to outlaw slavery at home and in its colonies.